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Another Tack: With intent to deceive

Appearing in Ramallah on the Palestinian Authority’s Shaheed (martyr) Day, Knesset Member Ahmed Tibi proclaimed that “nobody is more admirable than the shaheed… the ultimate source of pride… the symbol of the homeland… who blazes the trail for us and paves the path to liberty with his blood.”

To preempt Israeli backlash, Tibi feigned innocence. The word shaheed, he averred, means a person “killed by the occupation.”

Yet in everyday Arabic, suicide-bombers and perpetrators of any bloodcurdling atrocity in Allah’s name are popularly dubbed shaheeds. The Palestinian Authority’s media, schools and mosques – all under professed moderate Mahmoud Abbas’s control – glorify shaheeds as models of emulation for all, from pint-sized preschoolers onward.

No Arab harbors doubt about what shaheed means. Thus Tibi winks to his Arab listeners, who understand him perfectly, while he disingenuously pretends otherwise to us.

Tibi isn’t alone. Jerusalem-based Muhammad Hussein, the PA’s mufti (appointed by no other than the aforementioned Abbas, a.k.a Abu Mazen), declared at Abbas’s own Fatah faction’s 47th anniversary rally in Jerusalem that religious salvation is impossible without first eliminating the Jews. His diatribe, citing the Hadith (sayings attributed to Islam’s progenitor Muhammad), was aired January 9 on PATV (controlled by Abbas).

“The Hour [of Resurrection] will not come until you fight the Jews,” Hussein railed. “The Jew will hide behind stones or trees. Then the stones or trees will call: ‘O Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’” But Hussein, who frequently refers to Jews as “Allah’s foes” and as “descendants of monkeys and pigs,” subsequently feigned innocence, insisting he was just quoting holy texts, which alas, “cannot be changed as they’re sacrosanct, noble and oblige every Muslim.” The logical conclusion is that killing Jews is a hallowed religious commandment. As inveterate democrats, therefore, we cannot interfere with Hussein’s freedom of worship and assorted democratic rights.

Ditto for a whole host of Arab MKs, who enjoy all the Jewish state’s parliamentary perks, especially the freedom to thumb their noses at us in ways that wouldn’t be tolerated anywhere – certainly not in post-“Arab-Spring” Muslim strongholds, nor even in any Western democracy, never mind one embattled and struggling for survival.

Foremost among these MKs is Haneen Zoabi. She hobnobbed with Hamas leaders, praised them to the hilt, participated in the Mavi Marmara provocation of 2010, partied with terrorists released in the Schalit swap and authored an inflammatory forward to vehement Israel-basher Ben White’s latest book, Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy.

There she castigates Israel as a “colonialist racist project.” She explicitly applauds exploiting “the power inherent in democracy to undermine the moral and political legitimacy of Israel.”

Her previous pearls of wisdom include: “a Jewish state leads to the end of democracy”; “the largest threat to Zionism is democracy” and “to demand full civic and national equality is actually to demand the end of Zionism. So we don’t hate Zionism. Zionism hates democracy.”

Zoabi feigns innocence as a promoter of democracy. Her bottom line is that the disappearance of Israel as a Jewish state is democracy’s praiseworthy progressive objective. To oppose said objective is undemocratic.

Thus democracy is successfully assaulted by using the democratic idiom against it. Democrats fear raising a ruckus lest they be admonished for not being as self-destructively democratic as cynical anti-democrats oblige them to be. Willy-nilly, democrats turn into timid accomplices in their own destruction.

In 1946 George Orwell wrote an essay, “Politics and the English Language,” in which he highlighted the abuse of political terminology.

“The word Fascism has now no meaning,” he noted, “except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’ The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another… Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive.”

Zoabi, Tibi, Hussein and other fellow upholders of their democratic rights to bay for our blood, indeed all make ostensibly innocuous noises “with intent to deceive.”

More than it attests to our devotion to democracy, the fact that we keep tolerating Tibi and crew for so long attests to angst about being judged by our enemies as not suicidally democratic enough. Needless to stress, this aberration undermines Israel’s survival prospects – physical as well as democratic.

The incitement we stomach drives a dynamic. It radicalizes the Arab street within Israel proper. Radical anti-Zionism begets more radical anti-Zionism. Radical candidates radicalize their electorate, which in turn makes radical rhetoric an indispensable vote-getter in the Arab sector. This vicious cycle hinges on our broadmindedness.

The mufti who merely quoted his prophet’s exhortation to slay us won’t be indicted. He won’t be pilloried as was once-obscure rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, whose esoteric booklet on rules of warfare, Torat Hamelech, catapulted him to notoriety. Only Jews are censured.

Consistently, we play along with our worst enemies by abetting their slander merely to look liberal. This makes Jew-revulsion the badge of open-mindedness, justly deserving of protection under the right of free expression.

Conversely, Jewish resentment of anti-Jewish hate becomes uncool fascist muzzling of honorable opponents of fascism. The very term anti-Semitic is no longer politically correct because no one is quicker than anti-Semites to deny anti-Semitic motives.

Today’s anti-Semites are remarkably practiced in accompanying their invective with instant disclaimers – by now an expected part of the pattern. They bristle with righteous indignation at the very suggestion that hating us might imply anti-Semitism.

Heaven forfend we foolhardily stray into that semantic minefield. Equally rash is to dare bring up the Holocaust. That invariably occasions Judeophobic jeers, which discomfit us.

Also to be avoided is reference to any of the ghastly massacres perpetrated by Arabs against Jews throughout the 20th century. Numerous horrific episodes occurred before there even was Jewish sovereignty to fulminate against, to say nothing of the “occupation” that resulted from the 1967 war.

The Arabs instigated that war in order, as they said (back then without sly verbal artifice), to eradicate us, throw us into the sea, pulverize us to dust, incinerate us to ashes, reduce us to skeletal remains that would litter the Judenrein streets of Tel Aviv. Genocidal sentiments inspired ghoulish political cartoons rampant in Arab journals on the Six Day War’s eve. That, however, was when our would-be annihilators fully expected victory, before they were thwarted and thereupon pronounced themselves pitiable hapless victims without an unkind thought among them.

But such reminiscences are so yesterday, uncool and politically incorrect. The prevailing bon ton behooves us to erase from our minds any memory of Arabs plotting genocide in 1967. It’s patently indecorous in polite society to mention that the Arabs – far from being victims – were the aggressors, that they still are, that they feign innocence, that they pose as democracy’s champions with intent to deceive.

Sarah – perhaps one day you can write about the “humiliation” phrase that appears so often (at least in English) from Arabs, Westerners including Obama.
keep up the good fight, herb glatterherb@glatter.biz

Excellent article! I hope that Ms. Honig won’t feel ill when I say that I am a traditional left of centre British Jew living in Israel for the last 37 years.
Coincidentally, I as thinking about George Orwell’s essay a week or two ago and feeling annoyed about the theft of the English language. For example, the beautiful, poetic word ‘Gay’ has been plundered by the homosexual movement and the political expression ‘Left Wing’ by the haters of Israel.
All I can say to this is, I am a gay heterosexual left wing Israel lover.
As they used to say when I was young, “Put that in your pipe and smoke it!”

The salvation of Israel lies in adopting the motto coined by the Roman poet Accius. “Oderint, dum metuant”, let them hate, as long as they fear. The Israelits of to-day maintain that ghetto mentality of looking over their shoulder, afraid of what others may say. Forget the others. Great store is placed on The Quartet, consisting of the US which has become a handicap limiting Israel’s freedom of action, of the EU which is made up of nations which perpetrated or aided and abetted the Holocaust, Russia which has always supplied the Arabs with wapons, and the UN which, under Arab influence, always critcises Israel and persists in calling Gaza “occupied”. Hardly an evenhanded outfit. The Arabs just laugh and jeer at you, as well they might. Sderot was shelled for years. Instead of a creeping barrage for every incomig rocket there was just whining, sackcloth and ashes, no defence in the form of attack, the best known remedy. The IDF did nothing. Not much of a defence force. Instead of hanging murderers your lily-livered liberals ensconsed them in comfortable jails where they take degrees, doctorates, their families are paid handsomely by the EU and then over a thousand of them are set free to enable them to start all over again whereas dead men don’t blow themselves up. If all of them manage to kill just one Israeli again that is another thousand Israelis. May be that is what you want. may be you have a death wish. You are certainly going the right way about it. A square in ramalla

Can it be that the gossamer borders of Israel amount to nothing other than an invisible fence around a holding-pen housing a Jewish population of shaheeds themselves, of willing human sacrificial victims, offerings to the false Moloch of “exceptionally enlightened liberalism”? No. Nevertheless, that is how it looks to be sometimes, sad to say.

Thank you for that Orwell quote. He said it back in ’46 and still people seriously apply the word “fascist” to everything that irks them in a big way, from No Parking signs to the weather.

Still, you insist on your own shyness, a shyness I see in a lot of Jewish commentary. You use the word ‘Islam’ just once and the word ‘Arab’ eleven times. There isn’t anything naturally antisemitic about Arabs and, strictly speaking, antisemitism in the Middle East isn’t represented exclusively by ethnic Arabs either. The problem is Islam, “Muslims”. Being a Muslim is curable, being an Arab needs no cure.

The people of the Middle East are capable of rejecting Islam, they are not capable of rejecting their own racial identity. Being so delicate about religious issues is also a liberal weakness.

Dear Sarah,
I can only add my modest 2ç to the fine and well written comments:
“We are alive and kicking.”
Paraphrasing Mr. Michael Schneider’s comment, let me add to all concerned: “Put that in your narguile/hookah, and smoke it.”

Israel is walking a tightrope, by having it’s mortal Arab enemies included into it’s democratic system.
But the lies of the Arabs are in plain sight of everyones objective mind and only the enemies of the Jewish state will give any credibility to them.
The most promising weapon to thwart their hostile intentions must be the use of a clear language, to plow right through these semantic minefields, arrayed by leftist wimps to protect these nice Arabic genocidal freaks…
They must be verbally confronted and defeated by a politcal terminology which is clear-cut and not afraid to take on the ENEMY !

On the other hand, it may well be that in Israel the Jewish amalgam contains far more than the usual negligible trace element of suicidal self-loathing, but a deadly and explosive critical mass against the very idea and existence of a Jewish people or a Jewish state.

“The word shaheed, he averred, means a person “killed by the occupation.” ” – William Joyce, a.k.a. Lord Haw Haw, was German Radio’s main English-language propagandist in WWII, rabidly anti-Semitic, anti-British and anti-American. He was hanged in England for treason in 1946. In Israel he would have been a respectable Kneset member, encouraged, in the name of democracy and the High Court of Justice, to spew his vitriolic hatreds all over the country and the world and then explain to the brainless and cowardly natives that when he calls for killing all the Jews what he really means is shaming the few bad Jewish “occupiers.” Instead of hanging him Israel might well have erected a glorious monument to him.

I have thought so many times that Israel needs no “outside” enemies when there are enough enemies within the internal ranks and its borders to destroy this nation. Political correctness has overcome the world in every phase of our lives. To swallow the lies told by those who would like to see Israel destroyed is akin to accepting all that is being said as the truth. What is the truth? Where are the “truth tellers” when you are so surrounded by liars of every stripe? Within the Kenesset there are enough liars to start a large club of “Who is the best liar?” and “Who hates Israel the most?” Stand in line, for there are enemies on all sides, and Tipi Livni may just be the leader of the pack! God be with Israel, because if He turns His back on this nation, there is no hope. But I read the Scriptures and they assure me that the end is well taken care of. Just when all appears lost, God will step in with His mighty forces and destroy the enemy. Have hope! And by the way, I think we are in those “end times” as they are described in the Scriptures.